Forum:Unfinished projects
Category:Wikia maintenance This is a page where developers and anyone else can write a couple of lines about things that are or should be in progress (with links to relevant pages), so that others can see what's going on and: *avoid the duplication that comes from ignorance of something's existence *join in if interested *continue if original promoter has very long absence GEDCOM upload We need this eventually. Brian Yap (User:Yewenyi) devised a java program that he used to create most of the first 3,000 articles on this wiki (four or five per minute when in full flight). Other people have looked at it. User:Phlox believes that anything doing that job should be based on the Py... whateveritis bot system. Progress is desirable. One hurdle is to decide on the format of our individuals' page names, still under discussion on User talk:Phlox in early December 2007. Active work in April 2009: Forum:Gedcom bot and Rtol's improvements to Yewenyi's process Page names See above. Summary of progress: we want page names that Google will rank reasonably highly so that millions of people find us when looking up relatives. The insertion of middle names goes against that. The addition of birth dates and anything else after the surname may also lower the ranking a little (and causes trouble if it is used for /info pages then changed). A solution may be in two parts: starting with a Google-friendly page that we call a disambiguation page but has more on it than purely links to detailed pages with minimal distinction (per Wikipedia style); see Barack Obama for an example. Not unlike the two-to-three-line boxes you get with hits when searching Rootsweb: http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?surname=Obama&given=barack. Each detailed page could then include middle names, and for further distinction could add a birth date as we do now or could add just a decade (thus doing away with lots of "c/circa" notes and being less likely to get changed). Google-friendly part is now well established and just needs people to create thousands of disambiguation pages using hndis. Possibly done with bot help? See April 2009 Forum:Standardising page names for individuals and later forum discussions still not conclusive by March 2010; listed at Familypedia talk:Page names. People from Wikipedia We hope to have them all eventually We have hundreds of people in common with Wikipedia, and there is no intrinsic reason why we should not have an article for every individual who has a WP article. (It's part of our aim to have a page for everyone whose life has ever been documented.) They could be copied by bot, as were several thousand county pages. But that needs someone proficient with bots, not only for the copying but also to run the "wpxfer" that User:Phlox was using to convert all links to , or something that produces fewer #ifexist calls. — Robin Patterson (Talk) :Most people pages on Wikipedia lack basic genealogical information such as parents and kids. rtol 11:27, 26 April 2009 (UTC) ::That may be too sweeping but it may be right - though not an overwhelming majority? They can be bottom of the list unless a bot can bring them in easily. Familypedia may have the tools to find their parents. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:24, 3 May 2009 (UTC) :::I checked all 22 environmental economists on Wikipedia. 14 have a birth date, and 1 a birth year. None have parents, spouses, or children. Wikipedia is about the significance of their intellectual contribution, not about the people and their family. rtol 18:55, 3 May 2009 (UTC) :::Nobility would be a good place to start, as Wikipedia does have info on their family. Format is not consistent, so we'd need a smart bot. Info can be contradictory. rtol 19:01, 3 May 2009 (UTC) ::::With Project Charlemagne, rtol has been doing a grand job with the nobility and their descendants even without an importer-bot. But we already had scores of slightly famous WP people on List of famous people, some of whose pages could use just a little touching-up to be good enough for promotion on WP as noted below. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:18, June 20, 2010 (UTC) Value of getting them We can add some genealogical info to most WP person info (maybe with a general web search, e.g. if they are living we may find their own websites, some of which mention families, whereas if they are dead we may get more in genealogical databases such as WorldConnect). As soon as we have more genealogy than WP has, we can add an external link on the WP page using Wikipedia:Template:Familypedia. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:18, June 20, 2010 (UTC) Easy ways to get more *Work from Will Shade's excellent Famous Descendants of William the Conqueror of England (to which several of us have contributed). Many of them are still red-linked, and each of those has at least one parent shown. *Use more of the WARGS site. We have only a minority of its famous people (e.g. http://www.wargs.com/political/), and its setup is ideal for creating an Ahnentafel in our format before creating pages on which to base "Ancestor tree" subpages. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:18, June 20, 2010 (UTC) :Famous Descendants of William the Conqueror of England is outdated and incomplete. Many more of his descendants are now on Familypedia. The page clearly shows the pitfalls of trying to do these things manually. It would be much better to introduce a new Property:Descendant of William the Conqueror and autoprop. The code etc can readily be copied from Charlemagne. rtol 17:45, June 21, 2010 (UTC) Forum:Creation of /info pages for all person articles Can progress once we have improved the info page process. See Genealogy talk:Info pages/list of parameters.